Production
The actors did their own singing and played their own instruments live during the filming, with guitarist Jerry Zaremba overdubbing the guitar parts. Busey, in particular, was admired by critics for recording the soundtrack music for the film live and losing a considerable amount of weight in order to portray the skinny Holly. According to Busey's biography, he lost 32 pounds to look more like Holly, who weighed 146 lbs at the time of his death. His accurate portrayal was aided by knowledge gained from a previous attempt to film part of the Holly life story, the ill-fated Three-Sided Coin, in which he played Crickets drummer Jerry Allison (the film was cancelled by 20th Century Fox due to pressure from Fred Bauer and his company, who had made deals with the Holly estate). The screenplay of Three-Sided Coin (by Allison and Tom Drake) revealed many personal details about Holly, and Busey picked up more during off-set conversations with Allison.
The film follows Buddy Holly from age 19 to 22 (1955 to early 1959). Gary Busey was actually 33 when he played the role. Charles Martin Smith, who played Ray Bob Simmons, auditioned for the role of Buddy, but since Busey had been cast, the producers cast him as Simmons because they liked his audition.
Read more about this topic: The Buddy Holly Story
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)